Modern society is increasingly relying upon a multitude of electronic technology for conducting everyday interaction. For example, personal and professional communications, purchase transactions, account accessing, financial transactions, contractual agreements, etc. are being conducted using electronic communication. As a result of this increasing reliance, a plethora of personal, private and/or confidential information is being stored on electronic devices. Personal and/or business identification information, address information, account identifiers, medical data, relationship information, etc. may be stored in support of various applications or interfaces that provide functionality of conducting electronic transactions. The availability of personal, private and/or confidential information in one location may be attractive to unauthorized parties that seek to use such information for their own benefit. As a result, the implementation of protective measures in electronic devices is necessary to prevent personal, private and/or confidential information from falling into the wrong hands.
A typical protection model may include a software component installed in the device to monitor for threats. The software component may be administered by a centralized entity that provides updates to the software component and/or rules utilized to monitor for threats. While this architecture has been somewhat effective, it has been the standard for so long that many attacks (e.g., malware such as viruses or worms, attempts at unauthorized access, etc.) have been designed specifically to overcome this type of protection system. For example, the appearance of malware may be altered to circumvent monitoring rules, or malware may be inserted into low-level device operations (e.g., operating at a higher privilege level than the protection component) to circumvent detection. If an attack cannot be detected by the local protective measures in a device, then the device may be rendered defenseless to the attack.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.